by Dawn Davies
Out of necessity, you turn to solitary pursuits to occupy your time. You look for, but do not find, deer in the short woods, wandering in the pines until you accidentally find yourself in other people’s backyards. Housewives and younger children stare at you from their sliding glass doors as if you were a yeti, or a drunken outlander, stumbling out from an underground trench somewhere. Dogs on chains aim their bodies at you, lean in, and bark, so you slip back into the woods and walk home. You start laying cracker traps for the chipmunk in your own yard. You ride your bike for hours, up and down the hills, until it is too cold to ride bikes. You unpack your mother’s old record player and spend the winter upstairs in the dormer room, listening to show tunes and fifties doo-wop, picking out sounds on a toy organ. When your parents rent you a clarinet from the local music shop, you lose yourself in learning how to play it, then discover forties Big Band, which only further sets you apart from your peers. The friends come to you the way an iceberg melts. It happens, but it is slow. In the spring you play jump rope with some younger children up the road, and then football with the neighborhood boys. Eventually, you become one of the gang, playing Capture the Flag and Kick the Can, and Pickle and Horse. There is no denying that this achievement has been a crusade. You begin to like your new friends, but you do so with a caution, a guarding of your heart that is new.
Twenty-three months later, five days after you get an invitation to Kelly Moynihan’s birthday party, four nights after your first band recital, you walk home in the dark from your dog-sitting job at a neighbor’s house. They have a real piano in their front room, and you spend several hours a day there, learning to play “The Entertainer” and “Good King Wenceslas” by ear, with chords. On your walkway, the snow crunches under your boots, and it is a gritty, crisp sound in the silent air, and you feel a springing of joy, the joy of belonging to a place, the joy of knowing your place. You step inside and take off your coat and boots and as you straighten up, you notice your parents are sitting in the living room that no one ever sits in unless there is company. They are waiting for you. Dammit, you think. They lead you over to the dining room table and you all sit down. Their hands are folded. There is a pile of real estate magazines and an envelope of developed photographs in front of you.
“We’ve got some news,” they say, and you stand up from the table and try to leave the room. Your father grabs your arm and sits you back down.
“We’re moving to Florida. Look!” They seem excited. They slide over snapshots of palm trees and hibiscus bushes and other spotty, spiny, jagged plants, as if the contrast between what you know and what you see in the photographs will be alluring.
“We can go to Disney World anytime we want,” they promise, and you suddenly realize where you learned to fib.
“I’m happy here,” you say. “I made the band.” The tone of your voice, you realize, is starting to edge toward pleading.
“They have a band down there you can be in.” Out come more photos, this time of a Spanish-style ranch house. “It’s South Florida. It’s subtropical. There are lizards that live on the back patio,” they say. “And here. We have a pool. You can swim all winter. You’ll love it,” they promise, like they promised every other time, but you will not love it, you tell yourself. You hate lizards. You like mammals. You have spent the last seven months patiently laying out peanut butter crackers on the stone wall, trying to tame the chipmunk, and he has finally agreed to eat his cracker where you can see him, instead of snatching it and scrambling inside the wall. This is important, painstaking work. You are trying to trap him, even for a day, and months of progress will be lost if you leave. Also, you do not want to swim in the winter; you want to learn to ski, like your parents promised you could when they announced that you were moving to New York. Your head goes down in your arms on the table.
“When do we leave?” you ask, because it is inevitable.
“A couple of weeks.”
So, in the middle of Christmas break, you say good-bye to the tree you have grown to love, the one you can read in, the one that has an emergency escape route, the one you climbed up twenty-four feet on the day no one was there to witness it. Your friends promise to write, but you know they won’t. You yourself won’t get past one or two letters. You never do. You get into the backseat of the car and drive away, refusing to speak to your parents until two hundred miles past the Mason-Dixon.
* * *
Picture your first look at Christmas in the subtropics, whatever the “subtropics” are. South Florida is not all it’s cracked up to be, you decide in an instant, even if there are theme parks and prehistoric alligators and muscled, rashy surfer boys you know won’t look twice at you. The Christmas lights look limp and low-rent on palm trees and green grass, you immediately notice, and the plastic Santas and plastic reindeer and plastic nativity scenes look as if they are trying too hard, as if they, too, wish they were somewhere else. Is that Mother Mary, head bowed, sweating into her own lap? Is that wise man about to faint from heat exhaustion? It is eighty-five degrees outside. Christmas in Florida is a sham. You don’t care how many palm trees your parents pointed out on the drive down, you still hate it.
You drive up to the new house, unfold from the car, blinking and rumpled. As soon as you step outside, something terrible and frightening happens to your hair and it springs up into some sort of loose, half-crocked Afro around your ears. You immediately begin to sweat. You are strategically unimpressed during the walk-through, refusing to smile at your corner bedroom, the screened-in pool, and the schools within walking distance. Yes, there’s a pool, but the yard is a postage stamp, mined with ants that bite the crap out of you any chance they get. There is a smell you cannot identify that you later learn is mold, something to which you prove to be immediately and highly allergic. You start sneezing. You feel a stinging behind your eyes that has nothing to do with a sneeze. No one must see you cry, so you step out onto the front porch to get away from your parents and the real estate agent, who looks like a prostitute in her short skirt and bare legs—no woman can be taken seriously in business with wrinkled, prickly, vagina-looking armpits flapping around (you do not wear sleeveless shirts to this day, do you, on account of that woman’s armpits). You watch as a flock of kids your age ride their bikes past your new house, with fishing poles over their shoulders. They are bronze and sweaty. They stare you down with a look you’ve seen before, a hostile look that reminds you that you do not belong.
Remember fumbling through a day at an overcrowded middle school that is divided into races like the water from the land and the land from the sky. Black kids are here, and the white kids are here, and the Hispanic kids are over there, and none of the groups is particularly friendly, so you don’t know where to stand, and though this is a foreign thought, logic tells you that you should stand with the white kids because they look like you. You have become a cow in a herd of cattle, moving mindlessly through chutes as you try to find your new classes. Your head protrudes like a periscope above the throng of people who babble pointlessly to anyone but you. You wear the Docksider boat shoes your parents paid a fortune for at Christmas and cannot afford to replace because the move was so expensive. These shoes, a teen status symbol in New York State, have landed you the nickname “Cap’n Faggot” by the black kids at school. You have never been around black people whose speech patterns you could not understand and you feel like a foreign exchange student, yet you understand pointing and snickering and “Cap’n Faggot” as well as the next person.
You get caught up in trying to “make your mark” as first chair clarinet in the concert band, because you realize that music is your only skill, and this does nothing except cement your position as one of the school’s most forlorn nerds. You also spend considerable political effort trying to erase the nickname the white kids have given you: “The Lady Shaver.” The inopportune get-together with the concrete side of the swimming pool the day before your first day at school has left you with large, weeping scrapes across your ch
eek and upper lip and chin, and you show up on your first day sporting Band-Aids all over your face. The scrapes heal in two weeks, but the name lasts far longer.
At age thirteen, you are six feet tall and one hundred thirty pounds. Something about the combination of puberty and the South Florida dew point permanently alters the structure of your hair and it appears to others that you are wearing a wig from a closed-down clown school. Your wardrobe, which you cannot afford to amend, is pure Northern, and stands out in all the wrong ways, and all of this is accented by the black clarinet case you carry around like the president’s nuclear football. You hate school. You hate everything about it and everyone in it. There has been no talk of Disney World.
Within a few months, you hear angry voices and doors slamming in the middle of the night. You wonder if there was an affair, because that’s why people divorce in the movies, but you have no proof of anything because no one is talking, either to you or each other, but doors are thin, and your mother cries when she thinks no one is home. Your parents divorce as quickly as a summer storm, engineering a slow family tailspin that will take years to right.
Your mother moves into a small, cheap apartment on the other side of town, and you—your body, your mind, your soul—feel as empty as the house you are left to live in. When you come home from school late, the house is empty, the lights are off, and there is no more promise of meatloaf or casserole in the air, but instead mildew and dust, which have been waiting for the right opportunity to take hold and strangle you. In Florida, the outside is always trying to get in, and dank Florida smells are everywhere you go, stifling and wet and spongy. Pool chlorine and suntan oil, and salty air and fish. Black tar heating on the ribbons of suburban driveways. Gardenia and night jasmine that make you wheeze. It is unbearably hot everywhere you go. Hot like you think hell would be hot. In fact, you begin to suspect that you are in hell. Your head is so chronically stuffy that you begin to lose your balance when you stand up. Once, in desperation, you take a Benadryl before school and this makes you so sluggish that you fall asleep while watching a filmstrip in biology. The room is dark and warm, and you nosedive off the high metal stool and hit your face on the floor. Your lip splits. You are the Lady Shaver again.
You try to find things to keep you occupied. A neighbor gives you an old fishing pole, and you fish the canals. You pull up fish you cannot name and throw them back, until you meet up with an old man sitting on an upturned bucket, fishing with a cane pole. He identifies the fish you both catch, patiently, flatly: crappie, bream, bluegill, sunshine bass. You run into him again. And again. You develop a cautious sort of friendship. One day he hands you a second cane pole.
“Use this if you want to really get ’em.”
“Thanks,” you say, and you wonder if this is candy and he is going to try to lure you into the back of a van.
“You can keep it. It’s a good rig. My son did a lot of fishing with that rig.”
“Oh, doesn’t he still want it?” you say.
“Naw, he’s dead.”
“Sorry,” you say, though you want to say much more than that. You want to ask when and why, and how he is able to get up in the morning with a child in the ground, but you are afraid to stir the man’s sadness, afraid to stir your own, so you say nothing.
You fish in silence together in the afternoons until the mosquitoes come out for blood. One day you look in the mirror and your face is as brown as the native kids who rode their bikes past you that first day. Your hair is nearly as blond as it was when you were a little girl, and sits around your head like a halo.
You start to wander the canals farther from home. You see awkward anhingas air-drying their feathers on rocks and pipes, you sneak up on flocks of ibis honking softly before startling them to take flight, you touch the mossy backs of sunbathing snappers. You are able to recognize the thick, quick taunting flight of the Quaker parakeets, who sit in the trees above you and gossip during the hottest parts of the day. Everything here seems to eat each other. You poke at the edges of the canals, kill the empty hours that fill your day, and if it weren’t so unbearably hot and buggy, you might agree to reluctantly appreciate the extraordinary, quiet megacosm of nature that no one seems to notice in this place, this place that is built up between a swamp and an ocean, this place that, if you look underneath the hellhole of sprawled suburbia, is quietly magnificent and slightly savage.
Picture a dark South Florida canal in late spring, just before sunset. You step over a wood barrier, and slip past a tilted, broken chain-link fence, and down to where a large mango tree dips over the waterline. The water is dark and moving with a slight current most people would miss. You pick a mango off the ground, turn it for bug holes, then split it open with your thumbs and eat it standing up, leaning forward to keep the juice from dripping on your shirt. A great blue heron stands at the water’s edge, crafty and patient, like a pickpocket waiting for his next mark. A moorhen darts neurotically under a dock, crying mournfully for something you will never identify. She sounds like you feel. You are not the type of person to trespass or steal fruit from other people’s trees, yet here you are, on private property, and it is not your first time, either. Your father is out with the same woman you found frying bacon in your kitchen this morning, wearing one of his dress shirts and some smeary mascara and not a lot else. You don’t remember her name, but it doesn’t much matter. She won’t last long. It is your mother’s night to see you, but you have lied, as usual, made up an excuse about why you can’t go over to her empty apartment that breaks your heart every time you step across the threshold.
The house is thirty yards away and no one can see you. You hear dishes clanking and family noises in the distance, but you tune it out. You face east, sitting under a quiet canopy of leaves, and you wait. The sickly sweet mango buds are nearly overpowering, and a few besotted honeybees are taking advantage of this, swaying onto bud after bud, like bar-hopping drunks. The water pops and there is a ripple, and you look hard beneath the surface of the coppery, cloudy depth that is visible only when the sun hits it at a certain angle. It is just a mullet popping up to bite a skeeter, or perhaps rid its gills of itchy parasites. You freeze and wait, until the non-movement causes a tickling in your body that makes you want to scream. Then you see it, an elusive, almost misleading footprint in the water, and they are there. They glide up to the edge of the canal and float, fat and weightless. You slide onto your stomach and hang over the seawall.
Picture your hand, larger now, a little veiny, slowly sliding into the warm, brackish water, silently in the direction of the last of the sun’s rays. Gnats dive-bomb your eyes. You pull your hand up slowly, hover it above the surface of the water, which feels warmer still, and you wait. The manatee’s face rises up out of the water, an inch, two inches, and meets you halfway, brushing your hand with its baby whiskers. There is nothing to catch, nothing to trap, nothing to conquer, and as you tenderly cup your hand around the baby’s face, its mother surfaces, too. She looks at you with a tiny brown eye, then rolls over, trusting, placid, and lets you touch her child. They stay for a few moments, then slowly back down into the deeper water, and are gone. You watch them swim away, wishing for more, feeling an emptiness, but not an unbearable one. This is something, you think. It’s not enough right now, but maybe it could be. You admit to yourself, cautiously, that you might like it, thinking, Be careful. Don’t like it too much.
The sun goes down. You walk home in the dark, kicking a can down the middle of the road, thinking of manatees, thinking of odd birds, and of startled fish, imagining your parents meeting you at the door, asking you to sit down at the dining room table.
KEEPING THE FAITH
Once, when I was twenty, I went on a date with a man I met at the Army Navy store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was someone I would not have gone out with under ordinary circumstances, but it was an unusual time in my life, and I was in no position to be picky. It was mid-spring and I had, almost opposite to natural Northern law, lost a few
pounds over the winter, and I was looking for some new clothes. Grunge was in at the time, and the Army Navy was a good place to get the kind of cargo pants that we would cut off at the knees, flannel shirts we would rip the sleeves off of, fat-soled Dr. Martens boots, and anarchy T-shirts that we wore as if we were the only generation to rend our garments and rebel against the establishment. I wasn’t five minutes into flipping through a rack of spring fatigues when I felt someone looking at me. I turned around and saw a tall guy with an Afro and a Jimi Hendrix mustache taking me in from behind a bin of wool socks on clearance. I squinted my eyes at him and moved away. When he followed me I went to find the manager, and then discovered that he was the manager. His name was Kami, and he said he would like to take me out on a date. I said I wasn’t interested, but somewhere in the course of a short conversation, I sort of told him my name and the restaurant where I worked. I still don’t know why.
I left without buying anything and thought that was the end of it until he showed up at my job on a Friday night and found me holding a tray of drinks high above my head, my sweat making darker blue bursts of oxford under my armpits as I tried to press through the bar full of unfulfilled yuppies. He stood a head and a half above the crowd and I couldn’t miss him. He shouted that it was good to see me, and I told him I was on the clock. His eyes blazed at me again and this time I noticed that they were hazel. He asked me out one more time, hollering his words over the flock of patrons, and when someone said, “Aw, come on, tell him yes,” I said yes and everyone applauded. I wasn’t exactly pressured into it, but I now know why women who shouldn’t say yes end up doing so during public marriage proposals. I scrawled my number on a cocktail napkin and told him to go home, but here’s the truth: His efforts had moved me. I was nearly desperate for something (or someone) to come into my life and make me feel better.